"We'll watch her," said Aldous quietly. "I'll be with her to-day, Mac, and to-night I'll come down to the camp in the coulee to compare notes with you. They can't very well steal her out of Blackton's house while I'm gone."
For an hour after MacDonald left him he walked about in the neighbourhood of the Blackton bungalow smoking his pipe. Not until he saw the contractor drive up in the buckboard did he return. Joanne and Peggy were more than prompt. They were waiting. If such a thing were possible Joanne was more radiantly lovely than the night before. To Aldous she became more beautiful every time he looked at her. But this morning he did not speak what was in his heart when, for a moment, he held her hand, and looked into her eyes. Instead, he said:
"Good morning, Ladygray. Have you used——"
"I have," she smiled. "Only it's Potterdam's Tar Soap, and not the other. And you—have not shaved, John Aldous!"
"Great Scott, so I haven't!" he exclaimed, rubbing his chin. "But I did yesterday afternoon, Ladygray!"
"And you will again this afternoon, if you please," she commanded. "I don't like bristles."
"But in the wilderness——"
"One can shave as well as another can make curls," she reminded him, and there came an adorable little dimple at the corner of her mouth as she looked toward Paul Blackton.
Aldous was glad that Paul and Peggy Blackton did most of the talking that morning. They spent half an hour where the explosion of the night before had blown out the side of the mountain, and then drove on to Coyote Number Twenty-eight. It was in the face of a sandstone cliff, and all they could see of it when they got out of the wagon was a dark hole in the wall of rock. Not a soul was about, and Blackton rubbed his hands with satisfaction.
"Everything is completed," he said. "Gregg put in the last packing this morning, and all we are waiting for now is four o'clock this afternoon."